September 16, 2017 Fredrik Lindqvist Less than one minute reading time

Technology

This new release finally brings us the release of Hassbian based on the release of Raspbian Stretch. The most significant change with this is that we now run Home Assistant on Python 3.5.
Other than that the changes are mostly to our tool hassbian-config.

Hassbian-config

To allow you to customize your installation further, we have made a few additions to our tool called hassbian-config. Majority of these changes where contributed by @Ludeeus.

Upgrade scripts

@Ludeeus contributed the possibility to run upgrade scripts to the hassbian-config tool.

The Home Assistant community has been super busy in the last two weeks to bring you this amazing release. 60 different contributors have done over a 100 PRs filled with new features, bug fixes and performance improvements.

9 days away from our 4th birthday, we’ve just accomplished a couple of great milestones that I would love to share with you. We’ve hit over 8000 stars 🌟 on GitHub and starting this release we now ship over 800 platforms and components!

Customize editor

Another step in making Home Assistant configurable via the frontend has been contributed by @andrey-git: a customization editor! You are now able to inspect all (possible) customizations of an entity and update them with just a few taps. Want to change the name or icon of an entity? All possible in mere seconds.

Screenshot of the new customize editor.

New Home Assistant configurations will be created correctly automatically. If you are an existing user, make sure you have the config screen enabled and that you include customizations from customize.yaml.

Tesla

Thanks to the contribution by @zabuldon, you will now be able to control your Tesla car from Home Assistant. You’re able to check the temperature inside and outside your car, control your AC and unlock the car.

Input text

This release introduces a new input component: input_text contributed by @BioSehnsucht. With this component you will be able to set free form from the UI and then let that be used by your automations or templates.

KNX

This release ships a new KNX implementation thanks to @Julius2342. It will instantly show all changed states of KNX devices within Home Assistant. Additionally it brings support for HVAC devices and notification services. It also adds a service for direct communication with the KNX bus. You can connect to KNX/IP routing and tunneling devices. In the background it uses asyncio communication. Check the climate integration in action here and see the lights in action below:

Although the summer is in full progress, the development hasn’t stalled. This release brings bug fixes, clean ups and another 8 new integrations. On top of that we are also introducing a new script editor!

To use the scripts editor, create a new file in your config directory named scripts.yaml and copy your existing scripts over:

This release has to do a one time database migration which can take a long time on big databases (20 minutes). During this time the frontend will not work. Do not stop Home Assistant while it is in progress.

Release 0.51 is around the corner and it contains some really great updates.

Database speed up

The first one is more amazing database updates #8748 by @OverloadUT. Every query that has been tested executes in well under 1 second, even on a RPi using MySQL with 6 million rows and around 300 entities. This is true even when you’re getting an unrealistically huge date range!

Updating the database will take some time when you start Home Assistant. During that time, the Home Assistant frontend is not accessible. Please let it complete and do not turn Home Assistant off.

Frontend update

We have finished the migration of our frontend to be powered by Polymer 2. This has given us a big speed boost on Safari/iOS devices and has fixed a wide range of bugs.

We have also finished the automation editor. All triggers and actions are now implemented and so are most conditions (missing are and, or). The automation editor is also no longer Chrome only, it can now also be used in Safari.

Another change to the frontend is that we have reorganized the panels. The Z-Wave and automation configuration panels have been merged into the configuration panel.

Vacuum cleaners

As we have seen more vacuum cleaners land in Home Assistant, it was time to create an official component for them. That’s why @azogue introduced the new vacuum cleaner component in #8623. This allows first class integration of vacuum cleaners in Home Assistant. Out of the box we will have Dyson, Xiamo and Roomba as supported platforms.

Last Wednesday we released Hass.io, an operating system to take care of all the updating hassles that come with running home automation at home and so much more. This is a major milestone for Home Assistant as it is our first step to offering a fully integrated solution using a bring your own hardware approach.

The launch has been crazy successful. The 20 minute introduction video by BRUHAutomation already has 12.5k views in just 4 days with no less than 150 comments.

Hass.io will be a great foundation for bigger and better integrated features. Stay tuned.

Adding the power of voice to integrations

But enough about Hass.io, let’s not forget about Home Assistant. This release has completely revamped the way how we deal with voice integrations. We turned Home Assistant into a platform to write voice apps, no matter where the processing of the voice happens. This can be done by Alexa, Google Assistant or in the Home Assistant user interface.

We are super excited about the new functionality and hope that it will trigger a new type of applications and systems to be built on top of Home Assistant. This release includes a shopping list to show the new functionality. As a user you can add any item to the shopping list with your voice and also ask what is on your shopping list.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
shopping_list:

To make testing these applications easier, we’ve updated the conversation component. The component will now allow sentences to be configured that hook directly into the new voice functionality. Combined with the new interface it will allow for some great interactions! Check out the developer docs for more information.

History improvements

@OverloadUT has been recently spending a lot of time on optimizing the history database queries. This release includes PR #8632, the first in a list of improvements that he is working on. This PR greatly improves requests for single entities by using an optimized query for this use case.

The performance change in some of his tests shows this change to be about 300x faster (30 seconds to 0.1 seconds!) (There is no theoretical upper limit due to the issue with multi-entity queries getting worse the longer the current recorder run has been going.)

Xiaomi integration

Yes, it has happened! After being in beta for a while, the Xiaomi support is now available to all. @danielhiversen did an amazing job and we now support sensors, switches, lights and covers.

Velbus integration

Another awesome integration is that of the Velbus home automation system which has been contributed by @thomasdelaet. It integrates their sensors, covers, fans, lights and switches.

Manual alarm with MQTT control

A new version of the manual alarm component is now available with full MQTT control thanks to @colinodell. Using this you can build your own control panel to remotely arm/disarm the alarm. For example, using a Raspberry Pi to create an alarm.

Join Michael Kennedy at the Talk Python podcast for an hour long interview with Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, as they discuss the release of Hass.io and the vision for the perfect home automation.

TL;DR: Today we’re introducing Hass.io. Hass.io is an operating system that will take care of installing and updating Home Assistant, is managed from the Home Assistant UI, allows creating/restoring snapshots of your configuration and can easily be extended using Hass.io add-ons including Google Assistant and Let’s Encrypt.

Home Assistant is 2 months away from being 4 years old. In that time the Internet of Things has really taken off and we’ve seen many new devices and services. We saw the introduction of voice assistants like Google Home and new standards like Apple HomeKit.

Some things have been supported natively in Home Assistant, others have been integrated into Home Assistant via third party applications. All these moving parts caused our users to spend a lot of time maintaining their systems and applications instead of automating their homes.

So we decided to take a step back from day-to-day Home Assistant development and see if we could offer a solution that makes updating a breeze for our users. A solution that you can flash to your Raspberry Pi and no longer worry about. A solution that would still be local first and respect the user’s privacy.

And this is how Pascal Vizeli came up with Hass.io, an operating system based on ResinOS and Docker. Hass.io will take care of installing and updating Home Assistant, is managed from the Home Assistant UI, allows taking/restoring snapshots of your configuration and can easily be extended using Hass.io add-ons.

Hass.io dashboard

To install add-ons, a user can browse the built-in add-on store and install, configure and update any available application. Want to turn your device into a Google Assistant or make your configuration accessible via Samba/Windows networking? Both are a couple of clicks away! (Video demo - 38s, no audio)

As we strongly believe in the openness of technology, we are releasing Hass.io as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. That way any user can make sure that the code that runs in their homes is secure and safe.

Some frequently asked questions are answered below in the read more section.

Hass.io has been built by Pascal Vizeli, the UI has been made by Paulus Schoutsen and BRUHAutomation made the introduction video. Big thanks to Resin.io for building ResinOS and helping us get started with it. Also a big thanks to the community for early feedback, helping out with the documentation and add-on development ❤️